🗳 Introduction
Misinformation threatens democracy. In 2020, claims of a stolen election gained significant traction across social media. This undermined public trust in democracy, eventually inciting an insurrection. Leading up to the 2024 Election, pervasive misinformation continues to characterize the social media landscape and threaten democracy.
Video Of Capitol Riot
Main Goal: Reduce the spread of election-related misinformation and increase exposure to fact-based content.
🎯 Research Goals
- Understand and mitigate voting-related misinformation for 2024.
- Increase access to accurate, fact-checked voting information.
- Build a real-time response pipeline to counter emerging false claims.
📊 Methodology
Data Collection
- Collected social media posts using election-related hashtags.
- Used cosine similarity and cross-encoding for classification.
Misinformation Claim Categories
We identified 4 popular categories of election misinformation claims:
- Voter Registration
- Election Fraud
- Voter Eligibility
- Voter Restriction
Intervention Strategy
While most platforms already have ways to combat misinformation, they often simply attach the true statement onto the false claim. This inadvertently still propagates misinformation. To address this, we focus on only posting true statements to social media spaces discussing misinformation.
- Designed intervention statements containing only truth.
- Avoided repeating false claims in responses.
Claim: “You need a special stamp to vote by mail.”
Response: “No special stamp is required. USPS delivers all mail-in ballots with regular postage.”
Claim Tweet: “Overseas citizens can’t vote!”
Reply: “U.S. citizens living abroad can absolutely vote. Request an absentee ballot at FVAP.gov.”
Platforms
We considered 5 popular social media platforms in the U.S for our intervention:
- X, Truth Social, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok (limited automation)
⚙️ Real-Time Classification
Efficiently labeling recent social media posts with our misinformation claim categories is integral to our real-time debunking procedure:
- Collected recent social media posts using election and voting related hashtags and keywords
- Used cosine similarity and cross-encoding to determine the claim label
- Responded to the post with the relevant intervention statement
💬 Intervention Types
🧪 Results
- Successfully posted intervention statements on all platforms
- Automated pre-bunking for X, Truth Social, Reddit, and YouTube
- Automated de-bunking for X
Engagement
- Utilized relevant hashtags to improve the reach of our intervention statement posts.
- Monitored frequency and content of responses to our posts in order to measure the social media pulse leading up to an election
🚧 Limitations
- Low follower counts limited reach.
- Platform restrictions (e.g., TikTok, Reddit) blocked some content.
🔍 Main Finding
Posting only true, standalone facts about voting—without repeating false claims—reduces the spread of election misinformation and can be applied in real-time.
🌟 Impact
- Constructed a framework with which emerging misinformation claims can be quickly identified in real-time
- Improved on existing misinformation intervention strategies by emphasizing the exclusive use of true statements
- Exposed politically active social media users to more truthful information about the 2024 Election
🚀 Next Steps
- Expand to new platforms (e.g., BlueSky)
- Improve classification speed & accuracy
- Build audience reach via MDI accounts
🧠 Ethical Considerations
How do we remain politically unbiased when identifying and debunking election misinformation if the misinformation is inherently skewed toward one political party?
🙌 Acknowledgements
Supported by:
- Massive Data Institute
- Georgetown Computer Science, DSPP, Tech & Public Policy
- NSF REU Program
📁 Appendix / Downloads
- Download Poster PDF
- GitHub Repo (Coming Soon)